Deck title: SEO: Is this Really Necessary. Session title: Quality Versus Searchability.

1. SEO
Is This Really Necessary?

2. TOC
• The Problem: Brief history of search
• The Solution: How Google works
• Why We Care: Findability
• SEO: Making a Good Impression

3. 1.
Why search exists

4. In the beginning there were documents.

5. Then there was the World Wide Web.

6. Then there was a problem.

11. 2.
How Google works
(sort of)

12. Google’s mission is to
organize the world’s
information and make it
universally accessible
and useful.
Google’s Mission Statement

13. Google does 3 things
Crawls Indexes Ranks
Discover new pages Parse documents and Assign rank using
create keyword special sauce
indexes algorithms

16. Indexing: Each page gets a record
Page
Title
URL
Last Modified Date
Domain
Backlinks
Content
...

17. Indexing: Pages relate to other records
Page Domain
Title Authority
URL Backlinks
Last Modified Date Age
Domain ...
Backlinks
Content
Backlinks
...
Pages
Link Text
Domains
...

18. Indexing: Inverted Index
Term Documents
apple 3, 5, 11, 89
giraffe 3, 34, 88
celery 1, 5, 8, 52, 76
dinosaur 10, 24
camera 41, 44, 91

19. http://searchengineland.com/seotable

20. 3.
Why this matters to us

23. Findability

24. Findability is a term for the ease
with which information contained
on a website can be found, both
from outside the website (using
search engines and the like) and
by users already on the website.
Wikipedia, The Internet (2012)

26. Search Patterns, Peter Morville & Jeffery Callender (2010)

27. A lot has to line up for this to work.

28. Findability prerequisites
1. Google has to be able to find our content.
2. Google has to value our content.
3. Our content has to align with the search
keywords used by potential visitors.
4. Our content has to promote itself
(Microcontent).

29. Findability
• Better findability = greater readership
• Findability is a core quality of online content
• Users find content in various ways but (for
now) search is the dominant discovery channel

30. Findability is bigger than search
optimization.

31. Our writers are not really
thinking about SEO
anymore. Now it’s about
how we can spin a story
so that it goes viral.
Scott Havens, Senior Vice President, The Atlantic Media Company

32. It’s not about optimizing for search engines.
It’s about optimizing for findability.

33. 4.
What we can do

34. Speak the user’s language

35. “Speak the user's language” has
been a primary usability
guideline for more than 20 years.
The fact that the Web is a
linguistic environment further
increases the importance of using
the right vocabulary.
Jakob Nielsen, Use Old Words When Writing for Findability (2006)

36. Keywords
Keywords are what users type into the search
box.
Keywords represent the specific language and
terminology that people use when they search
for things.

37. Search is about matching.
Matching is about tuning.

38. The goal is to optimize content for
findability by fine-tuning our language to
match the language used by our
audience.

39. Microcontent

40. “Microcontent needs to be pearls
of clarity: you get 40-60
characters to explain your
macrocontent. Unless the title or
subject make it absolutely clear
what the page or email is about,
users will never open it.”
Jakob Nielsen

41. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur
adipisici
(50 characters)

42. What constitutes a good title on the web
is different from what constitutes a good
title in print.

43. The print reading experience is
immersed in context.

46. What Google sees
<h1>
Past, Present, Future
</h1>

47. Often, this is all a user sees:

48. At most, there’s an excerpt:

49. Titles on the web have
to do more work.

50. Final thought

51. We’re talking about making our content
robot-friendly.
But remember what the robots are trying
to do...

52. ...they’re trying to figure out
what humans value.

53. The robots are just the middlemen.
At the end of the day we’re still writing
for humans.

54. Great content is the best SEO strategy.

55. Questions?
• Email: rob@ravelrumba.com
• Twitters: @robflaherty